With movie theaters slowly reopening, it’s fun to actually get excited about blockbusters again. This year, we’re going to actually get some! Among the titles that were delayed from 2020, the most intriguing might be Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the first sequel to the original Ghostbusters franchise since 1989. (The Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy Ghostbusters was an unconnected reboot.) Original series director Ivan Reitman’s son Jason has taken over the franchise, and in addition to a new cast that includes Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Mckenna Grace, and Finn Wolfhard, he’s also brought back the surviving members of the original Busters: Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, and Bill Murray.

Receiving an award from the Santa Barbara Film Festival (via NME), Murray offered some rare comments about the film. Although he joked that he was initially skeptical about Jason Reitman taking over the franchise (“I remember his bar mitzvah!”) he was eventually won over by his ideas and that the result “really has the feel of the first one, more than the second one or the girls’ one.”

That doesn’t mean it was easy to make, though. Murray added:

It was hard. It was really hard. That’s why I think it’s gonna be good. We were just in it for a little while, but it was physically painful. Wearing those packs is extremely uncomfortable. We had batteries the size of batteries. They now have batteries the size of earrings. It’s still a really heavy thing to wear, all the time.

Although the pain wasn’t fun, Murray says in his mind, “when something has a very high misery quotient, something comes of that and some quality is produced.” Hopefully he’s right; we’re decades overdue for a great Ghostbusters sequel. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is scheduled to open in theaters on November 11, 2021.

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